Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 15

  The Window

  Outside of sleeping and wandering in the maze of corridors, the Five spend most of their time in the Common Room side by side in front of the window. Even in periods of acute intergroup tension, the physical proximity involved doesn’t bother them. They’re never as distant from one another as seated there practically shoulder to shoulder in the semi-arc of lumpy armchairs, eyes riveted to the glass rectangle in search of a private face. Some of the longed-for faces are decades apart. So the spectators are decades apart.

  The window is like a TV screen featuring three different channels for selective vision with no need to zap. Anyhow they can’t zap. They’re permanently tuned into Channel 1900 or Channel 1937 or Channel 1951 depending on their Paris sojourn date. It’s like armchair time-travel.

  Sometimes they exchange notes on their time-bound vision, except for Max. Max has nothing to exchange. He goes on seeing empty streets, empty buildings and the empty river. It’s static, like a jammed color-slide in a travelogue devoted to a dead city like Petra. He listens, though, to their accounts of happenings.

  Louis once describes a brawl in the summer of 1900 with smashed shop windows and white-eyed bolting horses.

  Margaret tells about a pair of lovers in the late spring of 1937. They always meet at the same café and kiss and then quarrel or quarrel and then kiss. Their emotional ups and downs are like a TV serial for most of the Five. Then one day the girl comes and waits. Her lover doesn’t show up. She comes five more times and waits. She weeps. Margaret weeps telling it. Seymour succeeds in keeping back tears.

  Sometimes they press their faces against the frigid pane and make out, barely, far below to the right, the main entrance of the Prefecture, not this ghost Prefecture but the real familiar Prefecture they’d known back then, with its irritated female functionaries bossing the confused foreigners about and stamping their carte de séjour with an aggressive bang and rudely thrusting it at them in dismissal.

  So there are two Prefectures, the phantom one they’re imprisoned in and the material one, side by side. Logically, assuming logic here, somewhere a wall must separate them. Somewhere there has to be a door – one out of the perhaps million doors here – that opens on that real Prefecture. That thought occurs to them fairly often but hasn’t become obsessional yet.

  One day (day out there, you can’t tell what it is here) Seymour too has something to recount out of his 1951 Paris. He’s by himself in the Common Room. At one point he leans forward in his armchair and cries out. He leaps to the window and presses his palms and face against the cold surface, making little throat-sounds. Then he goes limp, practically collapses. He has to tell it to someone. He goes to the women’s room.

  Helen is lying on her bed, staring up at the blankness of the ceiling, trying to achieve the same blankness in her mind. Seymour spoils it. He’s pale and stammering. She has to respond to his anguish. All her lives, past and present, people have expected that of her. Helen imagines he’s seen his Marie-Something out there, arm-in-arm with another man.

  Actually, what he’s seen isn’t nearly as terrible as that. A car accident, he says, a young woman lying smashed in the street. He doesn’t tell her that he took the victim for Marie-Claude until he deciphered her features beneath the blood and realized it wasn’t his sweetheart. Helen doesn’t want to see the sequel to the accident. Seymour doesn’t want to return to it. Anyhow, by this time the useless ambulance must have come, taking the girl away.

  Sometimes a spectator breaks the silence with O!! in fear and joy, followed by a disappointed Ohh… The first time it happens the others imagine that the privileged spectator of another decade has caught a glimpse of the lost lover, (O!!) and then has lost sight of her/him in the crowd (Ohh…). But one day it happens to them too and the initiated others, hearing their joyful-fearful exclamation, know that the flock of pigeons has wheeled and is heading straight for the window in a loom of retracted claws, white wing-pinions, metal-fire neck, ruby eyes, the outside world never so close.

  When they hear the cry of disappointment they know that the looming pigeons have vanished. There’s no contact between the two worlds. “It happened to me too,” say the others. “I don’t know how long ago.” They have no way of knowing when. There are no real clocks or calendars here.

  The window in the Common Room is their only clock. They see the night sky paling. They watch the long morning shadows of monuments wheeling and shrinking and then lengthening again past noon and finally vanishing with dusk. As a timepiece it’s no more satisfactory than a giant sundial. The approximate time is available only on sunny days and Paris is a largely overcast city.

  The window in the Common Room is their only calendar. It’s a pretty bad one except for two of the days. When they see the church doing a brisk business, pulling in well-dressed women, mostly elderly, for morning Mass, they’re sure it’s Sunday. Confirming the day, another ritual: the same women coming out of the pastry-shop with ribboned boxes that contain (behind their window the deprived onlookers guess at this, saliva flooding their mouths) rum-cake with whipped-cream topped by a candied cherry, multi-layered Napoleons (mille-feuilles), chocolate éclairs, like delectable turds. Sunday, then. Monday is the day the food-shops are closed and the work-bound crowds wear glum harried expressions.

  Theoretically, Sunday and Monday provide them with bearings for the other days. But sometimes they wake and see the trays of their three missed meals on the table, the food moldy. That throws calculations out of kilter. How many days have they slept through? Of course the cleaning-girl doesn’t know. She’d come with other meals but they were still asleep and so she’d gone away with those meals. She never recalled how many times that happened. Like the other functionaries, she has no sense of time and is quite stupid as well. So the Five have to wait for the rituals of morning Mass and patisserie to situate the day they’re in (or think they’re in).

  The window does keep them roughly posted about the time of year. They’re not dependent on the sun for that and you can’t sleep through a whole season. But they don’t want seasons. They dread the cycle of seasons. The hour and the day, yes, for short-term orientation. But they want permanence to that scene they’d witnessed, dazzled, in the dark corridors God alone (perhaps) knows how long ago: the bright summer-clad couples sipping colored drinks at sidewalk café tables, and slow lovers advancing along cobble-stoned quays, shaded by the fresh foliage of lime trees.

  But the seasons wheel past. Bastille Day rockets burst in the night sky and they know it’s mid-July. The foliage of the lime-trees rusts and falls. The sun weakens daily. Snow fills the window like static in a TV screen. Garlands of colored bulbs span certain streets and the shop-windows are filled with tinsel and green wreaths.

  In despair they watch the tipsy midnight crowd celebrate the new year outside: 1901, 1938, 1952. The garlands of colored bulbs vanish. The sun timidly rallies and shadows shorten. Their despair deepens when joyous children go past, their faces grimed with colored chalk. That’s Mardi Gras, they know, so February. Willows fill with a fine green mist and they guess at late February or early March. Chocolate bunnies and eggs in the confiserie window announce the approach of Easter, that earlier, more successful, resurrection. The sticky swollen buds of chestnuts confirm late March. They unfurl green in April. Candelabrums of white chestnut blossoms illuminate May. They fade in early June.

  And now the Five are back to café couples sipping colored drinks and slow lovers on the quays, but certainly different couples and lovers. Once more, from their posthumous Bastille no mob can possibly ever storm to liberate them, the Five witness the July 14 fireworks and the final sparks drifting past the stars. In no time, from the no-time of their space, they again see the garlands of colored bulbs spanning the streets.

  They’re tortured on the wheel of the seasons.

  By the start of the first of those new years, 1952, Seymour had been back in New York, writing imploring letters to Marie-Claude and get
ting no reply. What good would it do being transferred to the Paris of 1952 (or worse, later), everything wrecked beyond repair?

  By the summer of 1938 Margaret – Maggie then – had met someone else and then had been expelled from France. Had Jean survived her departure? She recalls his wild threats of suicide. Wouldn’t return be to his grave?

  By 1901 Louis had been transferred to the States and had foolishly married at the end of that year.

  During 1952 and most of 1953 Helen had wandered about Paris in search of Richard. The Paris she stared at through the window had to be situated long past 1953. She’d returned home in November, 1953.

  What point was there for any of them to be transferred to this later Paris?

  Time goes on and on out there, enlarging the gap between them and 1900 and 1937 and 1951. Over and over they observe the sun creeping closer and closer to them. At summer solstice the sun marks the high tide of the year on a particular pavement-crack and then begins retreating from it and them day after day. Shadows lengthen. Trees go bare. Christmas decorations fill the shop windows. Trees break into leaf again, the same wearisome cycle all over again.

  They realize that their year in Paris – 1900, 1937, 1951 – has been left behind for all time, that they are on a train supposedly local but turning out to be wildly express, a ghost train powering past the local station with their sweetheart on the station platform, dwindling to a dot, no return ever.

  They can’t accept the loss of their year of love, the loss of possible return to it with the hindsight power of undoing fatal things done in that former existence, the hindsight power of doing essential things undone back then.

  They clutch at theories to explain away the relentless flow of time outside. They try to believe that the rotation of seasons is largely an illusion attributable to their unimaginative dreams, largely carbon copies of their daytime activities. In those dreams they often sit before the window and watch seasons. Sometimes in the dreams they go to bed and dream of watching seasons. So with dreams within dreams within dreams, how can they tell how many times the trees have really lost green and recovered it or how many times fireworks have celebrated that enviable liberation of prisoners from a distant Bastille? It’s like seeking a bouquet in a room filled with mirrors. Out of that multitude of reflected bouquets, which is the real one?

  But the burned-out bulbs accumulate, contradicting the optimistic theory of dream seasons. Seymour realizes that if ever, by miracle, he’s transferred outside it wouldn’t be to the spring of 1951 and his twenty-three-year-old sweetheart, but to some later year, who knows, maybe the late seventies and his darling in her fifties. How could she still be his darling in her fifties, he still twenty-five? How could he imagine shaming her with his unchanged youth?

  He tries to derive poor consolation from the possibility that maybe only ten years have wheeled by outside and that if he’s transferred now Marie-Claude would be thirty-three, still desirable. If married she was probably dissatisfied with the state (as he himself had been after a few years of it) and so he, Seymour, would be promoted in her mind from an object of rancor into an object of nostalgic desire. But how would she react to his unchanged youth?

 

  Unchanged youth.

  Only Margaret has doubts about that facing the mirror. One day she asks Helen to use the emergency phone and request a jar of cold cream. Helen points out that the phone is for emergencies.

  “But it is an emergency. My skin is getting all dry and ugly. Look.”

  In a second Margaret is out of her pajama top. She turns slowly, hands clasped behind her neck, her face tragic.

  “See?”

  “You look all right to me,” Helen says, understating her feelings. “I’ll try to find something though.”

  She salvages a hunk of rotten banana from dinner and applies it to Margaret’s back in slow circular movements.

  “That feels so good,” Margaret breathes. “But I must smell awful.”

  Helen takes the remark as permission to approach her face to Margaret’s satiny skin.

  “You smell like a banana plantation in flower,” she says and goes on breathing in Margaret’s fragrance, which has nothing to do with bananas.

  The slow banana-massage becomes a weekly rite.

  But, with that exception, the others are convinced that, burned-out bulbs to the contrary, time has halted for good here. Whatever the season outside – passersby mopping their brows in glaring near-zenith suns or struggling bundled against snow gusts – the temperature never varies here. It’s always as dank as a vault, a perpetual unheated November. The cycle of the sun out there – dawn, noon, dusk and night – is of no help here. Their suns here are static light bulbs burning overhead. There’s no night here. The Five sometimes suffer from insomnia. They explore the corridors and expect to open doors on deserted offices, the lights switched off, the typewriters shrouded. But the functionaries are always there, busily typing and filing and supervising. Do the functionaries ever sleep?

  Another question: do the functionaries ever age? The functionaries look uncomprehendingly at them when they ask about the date or the day. Time is a fog for the functionaries, like what they see out of the window. An inscription dating from a supposed 1929 abuses Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque. Max exited in 2000. Is it conceivable that d’Aubier de Hautecloque has been prefect for at least seventy-one years? And if it’s at least the year 2000 here how can you explain the absence of the office equipment of even the late twentieth century? Why those cliffs of archaic filing cabinets? Where are the computers? Why those ancient Underwood typewriters like baroque altars the female functionaries endlessly bow to?

  The one thing that theoretically structures time here are the meals. Breakfast has to be early morning, of course. But in that case, why are the shadows outside so long, marking an afternoon hour? When lunch is served inside it’s dusk outside. The Five try to believe the meal is supper but real supper is served at what must be a wee-hour outside: those dark buildings, streetlights making spaced pools on empty sidewalks, traffic reduced to a rare car or carriage. Logically, a few hours after that supper the Five go to bed although the night sky is brightening with the promise of sunrise.

  They end by refusing to conform to this crazy violation of normality. They let their food wait and match mealtimes here with mealtimes out there. They go to bed when the yellow squares of windows outside go black, announcing collective bedtime for millions out there. They try to get up when the night sky starts brightening and they bolt their breakfast then. They synchronize their nauseating lunch with the delectable lunches the restaurants serve outside. Of course their postponed meals are cold. But it’s no sacrifice. Those meals are served cold to begin with. Seymour has to soothe the dim-witted cleaning-girl. She thinks it’s somehow her fault if they don’t eat immediately.

  So their allegiance is to the normal passage of time outside even if that passage tortures them.

  They have a ritual.

  A little bit before dusk outside they switch the lights off in the Common Room. They’re plunged in gloom but the light, what little there is of it, comes from outside, stingy but authentic light. When the darkness is complete inside, they sit waiting for the windows in the buildings outside to light up yellow. When that happens they switch the lights in the Common Room back on.

  Synchronized like that with the real people outside, it’s a kind of communion. It provides them with the illusion of belonging out there.

  They even try to introduce measured time to their timeless space. Louis explores the rooms and comes up with scraps of metal and wood and wire and rope which he slaps together to fashion the primitive great-grandfather of all grandfather clocks complete with weights and pullies. He synchronizes his tinkered time to guessed-at time outside. But the clacking of the mechanism interferes with sleep. To Seymour it sounds like someone hammering nails in the lid of a coffin.

  After a while the clock breaks down, to everybody’s secr
et relief. Louis dismantles it. He suspects that, anyhow, it hadn’t kept very good time.

  Seymour often thinks that they’re like inconsolable exiles, insanely faithful to the ways of their lost homeland on the other side of the world, clinging to their ancestral antipodal time-zone, sleeping through the daylight hours here which are night-hours back there.

  Or they’re like British colonial administrators, stiff and solemn in evening dress in a jungle, celebrating the Queen’s Birthday, superior to the monkey-shit raining down on them and the shrieks of copulating natives.

  The Five have no Queen but they do have Christmas to celebrate. It’s an easy day to identify. When they see kids on brand-new bikes with a little tinsel still in the wheel-spokes, they guess at December 25.

  Each time it comes round Helen says “Merry Christmas” to everybody, probably not ironically. She’s not a humorous girl. That greeting is the only gift she has.

  New Year too is identifiable.

  But at the sight of the tipsy midnight crowds Helen doesn’t wish anyone “Happy New Year.”

  The new years that keep on coming can only be unhappy for the Five.